A Killer's Mind (Zoe Bentley Mystery Book 1)

by Mike Omer

  “Zoe,” he said. His voice changed. Softer. Angrier. The voice of a killer. “If I need to break this door, you’ll regret it, Zoe.”

  Shaking, she looked around for a weapon—any weapon. She saw none. She used to have a baseball bat in the room when she was ten, but she’d gotten rid of it when she stopped playing. Stupid. So stupid.

  “You know what I do to women who make me angry, Zoe,” he said, and there was another giggle. “You might like it.”

  Andrea sobbed, eyes shut tight. Zoe hurried to her side, covered her ears again.

  “Beth liked it. She moaned when I shoved myself inside her. She acted like she hated it, but I could feel how much she loved it. She loved it, Zoe.”

  She wished she had four hands. She wanted to cover her own ears as well as her sister’s.

  “Do you think you would like it, Zoe? When I rip your shirt and your pants? When I give you what you want, bitch? Would you moan like Beth did?”

  She was crying as well, sobs of fear and horror, her hands plugging Andrea’s ears tightly, hoping she wasn’t hearing any of it.

  “Do you think little Ray-Ray would like it?”

  “You stay away from her!” Zoe shrieked, tears of fear and anger in her eyes.

  The same giggle. “Oh. You wouldn’t like that, would you? Maybe I should start with her. Open this damn door, or I start with her, Zoe.”

  She got off the bed and flung open the window. The freezing cold outside chilled her bones.

  “Help us!” she cried desperately. “Help! Police! The killer is here. Help!”

  The thumping on the door began again. “Open this damn door, you whore! You bitch! Open the door. Open it. Open it!”

  “Help us!”

  The light switched on in Mrs. Ambrose’s bedroom.

  “Please help.”

  The door juddered again.

  Mrs. Ambrose moved slowly to the window. A woman who had all the time in the world, shambling over to check what the noise was all about. She peered outside, saw Zoe screaming. Her eyes widened.

  “Call the police!” Zoe shouted.

  Mrs. Ambrose hurried away. The woman picked up the phone in her bedroom. She dialed quickly and began to talk animatedly on the phone, glancing back toward her window constantly.

  If they hurried, they could catch Glover in the act.

  The house had gone suddenly silent. Glover wasn’t trying to cajole his way inside or threaten her or break down the door. He was gone.

  Almost six months had passed since the night Glover had nearly broken into her room. It was early morning, and the summer sunlight shone through Zoe’s window. She gazed at the wall, holding one shoe in her hand. She had been in the process of putting it on when she’d become lost in thoughts and memory, her bare foot forgotten.

  The nightmares were slowly fading. Only two, maybe three nights a week she’d wake up screaming, which was almost normal. Definitely better than the weeks that had followed that night, when she couldn’t sleep for more than four hours straight.

  No more murders had transpired in Maynard during that time. And Glover was gone.

  He had disappeared that very night. Her dad and the cops had come knocking on his door, but no one had answered. The bedroom had been mostly cleared. He’d left a few magazines in the drawer, but no gray ties, no shoebox.

  No one believed he was the killer.

  They believed he had come into the house that day, that he had yelled at Zoe. But the police assumed it was because he was embarrassed she had seen his porn collection. That she misunderstood his intentions, that he just wanted to talk. She’d even overheard one of the cops say, as he left their house, “That crazy girl scared the poor guy away.” Her mother had begged her to stop telling people that Glover was the killer. Especially now that they knew who the killer really was.

  Manny Anderson had been arrested, suspected of the murders. The police had found a picture of Beth in his home and other “suggestive evidence.” What could this suggestive evidence be? His Dungeons and Dragons collection? He and his parents maintained his innocence while his face was plastered on the front page of all the local newspapers alongside the portraits of the three dead young women.

  And then he had managed to hang himself with a bedsheet in his cell. Case closed. The Maynard serial killer was gone. People could sleep again. Zoe had cried for hours when she heard about it. She cried for herself as much as for him. With his death, the chance to prove his innocence and shine the suspicion on Glover was gone. Rod Glover had raped and killed three young women and had gotten away with it. She didn’t know how he had managed to get his alibi to stick, but he had.

  She kept thinking that if she’d been older, if she had had a shred of authority, Glover would be in jail. Manny Anderson would still be alive.

  She turned her eyes to glare at her bookshelf, brimming with books about serial murders, psychopathy, forensic psychology. She didn’t bother hiding them anymore.

  She sighed and put on the other shoe. It was time to face another day.

  Her mother was in the kitchen making breakfast. The smell and the sizzle of the bacon and the eggs in the pan made Zoe’s mouth water.

  “Good morning,” her mom said. “I was just about to check up on you. It’s late. You need to be outside in five minutes.”

  “Okay.” Zoe yawned. Five minutes was plenty of time. Eat bacon and eggs, brush teeth, wash face, comb hair . . . yeah, she could definitely make it in five minutes.

  “There’s a letter for you,” her mom said, her tone slightly disapproving.

  Zoe had started to correspond with a freelance private investigator and profiler a month before. She suspected he mostly enjoyed the adoring letters of a young teenager. She was milking him for every bit of knowledge that he had.

  “Thanks, Mom,” Zoe said and approached the small stack of envelopes. Mostly things for her parents, bills and similar stuff. One brown envelope, addressed to Zoe Bentley. She opened the envelope and shoved her hand inside to pull out the contents.

  She frowned. There was no paper inside. Only a smooth strip of cloth. She pulled it out and stared at it, feeling her insides grow cold.

  It was a gray tie.

  CHAPTER 49

  Chicago, Illinois, Thursday, July 21, 2016

  Zoe bit her lip and opened the drawer in the desk. The three ties were discarded inside, on top of the envelopes, as foreboding as three snakes. She would give them to Martinez tomorrow; she just needed to present the case in a convincing manner. If she went to him now and told him that the murderer hounding Chicago might be a man she had accused of being a serial killer when she was fourteen, he’d assume she was crazy. He would probably remove her from the case. Maybe Tatum as well.

  She had to do her research carefully before talking to him. Find all the corresponding evidence. The important thing was not to present this as the guy she had been obsessed with as a teenager but as a dangerous man, one who’d killed many times before.

  Had Glover really sent her those ties? She tried to think of alternative explanations. Could it be the reporter himself? But how would he have known about the former envelopes? And though she was not a forensic document examiner, the handwriting on the three new envelopes seemed very similar to the handwriting on the envelopes she had at home. Was it possible that the same person had sent her all the envelopes, but it wasn’t Glover? No. There was no way anyone else would know about the ties and their significance.

  The envelopes had come from Glover; she was convinced of that.

  She was less convinced regarding her gut instinct, that he was the killer that the newspapers called the Strangling Undertaker. She tried to force herself to be objective about this. Did Glover really fit the profile of the embalming serial killer?

  There was at least one distinct change in his behavior: the fixation upon dead women. Rod Glover’s targets were very much alive. They were alive when he raped them, and once he had killed them, they no longer interested him. Could this have
changed? She could feel the gnawing of doubt in her mind.

  She set that contradiction aside and examined the rest of the evidence. She could see many links between the murders in Maynard and the current murders in Chicago, but what had he done between then and now?

  Years before, when Zoe had begun working with the FBI, she’d gained access to the bureau’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. She’d immediately begun using ViCAP to search for more murders that fit Glover’s MO and signature. She learned that the word tie was very problematic when searching for crimes since it brought up thousands of reports where victims had been tied. Searching for gray tie resulted in nothing relevant, but that meant nothing. The person who submitted the crime report to ViCAP might have simply neglected to mention the tie color. Or maybe Glover had switched colors. It took her months, but she finally concluded that if Glover had murdered anyone, the murder was not in ViCAP. She was disappointed to find that more than 90 percent of murders and rapes in the United States were not submitted to ViCAP at all. People were busy, it was a cumbersome procedure, and using it wasn’t required in most places.

  That morning, Scott had helped her get access to the CLEAR system from her own computer. She was now going over all the murders involving rape or strangulation since 2002. She would have preferred to go all the way back to 1998, when Glover had disappeared from Maynard, but the database didn’t go that far back.

  She was sleep deprived and rattled to the core, her usual detachment gone. Reading report after report of women being raped and murdered was overwhelming. After about forty reports, she felt a lump in her throat, and her fingers were shaking. She went for a walk in the hallway, breathing deeply, trying to relax. Then she sat down and sighed. She decided to play some music, feeling the need to have a background distraction for this soul-wrenching task. Desperate for cheerfulness, she plugged in her earbuds and played the album One of the Boys, by Katy Perry. The dissonance was too much to bear, and she turned the music off after “I Kissed a Girl.” Murder reports weren’t meant to be accompanied by pop music.

  She found what she was searching for when she got to 2008. Two murder cases, seven months apart, of women whose bodies had been found naked and strangled. Shirley Wattenberg had been found in Little Calumet River under the bridge on Woodlawn West Avenue. The item used to strangle her was missing, and Zoe suspected it might have been washed away into the lake. The second victim, Pamela Vance, had been found in Saganashkee Slough. This one had had a tie around her neck. Both cases were still open.

  “Hey, want a ride?”

  A voice behind her made her jump. She turned around, looking up at Tatum’s smiling face. He stood with briefcase in hand, on his way out. She checked the time: 9:00 p.m. The room was completely deserted. She hadn’t even noticed the people around her leaving.

  “No, thanks,” Zoe said. “I’m, uh . . . I’ll take a taxi when I’m done. I really just want to get that report to Mancuso this evening.”

  He shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

  He left, and she turned back to her computer. She kept looking up to 2016 and found no other cases. This didn’t discourage her at all. The claim that serial killers never stopped, that they had to keep on killing, was nothing but a myth. Serial killers often stopped for months and years, fulfilling their needs with self-relief. Sometimes they didn’t stop but hid the bodies well or killed in faraway places. There was nothing strange about the long pause between the two murders in 2008 and the five murders that began in 2014.

  She read through the case reports slowly. Though the item used to strangle Shirley Wattenberg had been missing, the marks on her throat indicated a wide, smooth, flexible noose. One of the detectives on the case had theorized that it was a belt, though there were no markings that indicated a belt buckle. This definitely seemed to fit Zoe’s theory that a tie had been used. The crime scene photos showed a naked body of a woman lying on her stomach, partially in the water. This was identical to the way the bodies had been found in Maynard, back in 1997.

  Pamela Vance’s photo looked similar. The autopsy report detailed several indications that the victim had struggled violently before dying. There were several overlapping markings of ligature, and the ME concluded that the first attempt to strangle the victim had been unsuccessful due to her struggling. The murderer had had to try again, and the noose had shifted a bit, resulting in the overlapping bruises. There were injuries due to sexual assault both antemortem and postmortem.

  The victim had died of strangulation as she was being raped. And he had kept on going.

  Zoe leaned back, feeling sick. Was this it? The moment that Glover had changed? It definitely fit.

  Was it enough?

  She imagined herself presenting the case to Tatum and Martinez. Three murders in 1997 in Maynard, the suspect never convicted because he had killed himself while incarcerated. Two murders in 2008 matching the MO and the signature of the Maynard serial killer. And five murders between 2014 and 2016 with clear links in the MO and the signature to the murders in 2008. And the gray ties. She tried to figure out a way to bring up the gray ties sent to her. How would she explain Glover’s obsession with her?

  She’d have to tell them about that night. About what she had seen in his home. And she had to make them see she had been right then and that she was right now.

  A fear she hadn’t felt for many years crept in. The fear that they wouldn’t listen.

  She needed more. And then it occurred to her. If it really was Glover, he had to have known Susan Warner somehow. Perhaps he’d been her neighbor or someone she’d dated. He had to have known she was alone, that no one would barge in as he embalmed her in her home. And if that was the case, maybe Daniella Ortiz knew him.

  Daniella seemed subdued somehow when she opened the door. Her happy rainbow outfit gone, she wore a black pair of yoga pants and a pink shirt that said LIVE SLOW, DIE WHENEVER. Her eyes seemed a bit puffy.

  “I’m sorry for the late hour,” Zoe said.

  “No, please, come in. I’m happy to have a bit of company.”

  Zoe entered the apartment. “Everything okay?”

  “Oh, just a rough couple of days.” Daniella sniffed. “They happen to everyone, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Can I get you any coffee?”

  Remembering the condensed caffeine monstrosity from last time, Zoe said, “No, uh . . . maybe tea?”

  “Sure.” Daniella stomped to the kitchen. Zoe sat down, looking around her. The pictures bombarded her already-frayed brain, and she shut her eyes, taking a deep breath. She was still reeling from the implications of the envelopes the reporter had found, and memories from the past kept emerging. People and places she hadn’t thought of in years were swimming in her mind.

  “Here,” Daniella said. She handed Zoe a cup of tea. She had one for herself as well. This time she didn’t get a chair for herself, sitting next to Zoe on the couch. Zoe didn’t mind. There was plenty of room for both of them, and she wasn’t there to question Daniella, just to show her a picture.

  She sipped from her tea, which turned out to be thick with sugar. Grimacing, she put the teacup on the table and fished the printed image from her pocket.

  “Do you recognize this man?” she asked, handing Daniella the page. It was a print of the only picture she had of Rod Glover. She had acquired it when she was fifteen, from the office he had worked at. They had a picture of him from a Thanksgiving party. He looked happy and slightly drunk. Not the face of a killer. But then, most killers didn’t have a particularly violent face.

  Daniella took the picture and stared at it for a long time. “No,” she finally said.

  “Look carefully. Are you sure you’ve never seen him before? Maybe Susan knew him somehow?”

  “If she did, I don’t think she told me. He doesn’t look familiar. I’m sorry.”

  Disappointed, Zoe took the printed image from her. “Do you think Ryan might recognize him?”

  Daniella shrugged. “He might.
He’s not here, though.”

  “Do you know when he’ll be back?”

  “He never tells me, and if I ask, I’m nagging, right?”

  Zoe nodded in kinship. “Do you have a pen?” she asked.

  “Sure.” Daniella went to the kitchen. The kitchen was the place where pens were in the Ortiz household. She returned a moment later, handing the pen to Zoe.

  Zoe wrote her phone number on the paper. “Can you show Ryan this picture when he gets back?” she asked. “If he’s seen this man, just give me a call, okay? Or if you recall seeing him.”

  Daniella nodded. “Sure,” she said. “We’ll call.”

  “Thanks.” Zoe got up. “And, uh . . . I hope you have a nice evening.”

  Daniella nodded, staring down. Zoe followed her eyes to the bare floor. There was nothing there. Only loneliness.

  It was as if she were dragging heavy chains behind her as she walked up the motel stairs, lifting one foot after the other, each step heavy and tired. During the past years, whenever she would get an envelope, she’d feel as if Glover were reaching out and pulling her back. For him, she was still a fourteen-year-old girl who could be intimidated and terrorized with little to no consequence. Sometimes years would pass between the envelopes. She’d start relaxing her guard. And then another envelope would arrive in the mail. Always with a gray tie inside.

  Now it was worse. He was somewhere in this city. He was killing young women. And he was laughing at her, taunting her, so sure she couldn’t find him.

  She gritted her teeth and clenched her fists. That twisted, psycho bastard. She’d find him. She would get him arrested. He would die in prison.

  She reached her room, unlocked the door, and stumbled inside. She lay on her bed, too drained to brush her teeth or shower. Too worked up to fall asleep. Stuck in her own looping thoughts.

  Finally, she pulled out her phone and called Andrea.

  “Zoe?” her sleepy sister said over the phone.

  “Hey, Ray-Ray.”

  “What time is it?”